Lost Illusions

Lost Illusions is one of the longest novels and the part of Honore de Balzac's infamous series La Comedie Humaine consisting of more than 90 novels. It tells us the story of an ambitious young poet, Lucien Chardon. He and his best friend David Sechard, the owner of a printing press, dream of inventing a revolutionary way of producing paper in the future. The book highlights some major factors of the society back in the time and how a lethal combination of corruption, decadence, and revenge can change the course of your life by forcing you to make rather inadequate judgments. These stories are written with great verve and gusto in an ingenious pastiche of 16th-century language by Balzac. It highlighted the flaws in the media back in the day and how people were manipulated into believing anything they read. With a simple yet compelling story, Balzac accentuated the reality of media back in the sixteenth century. This makes us wonder, how much do we see is true, and should we believe what we see in the media today?